Cheryl McGinnis Gallery is proud to present Lin Yan: Enshrouded. Born in Beijing into a prominent lineage of Chinese artists, Lin Yan’s ground-breaking cross-cultural work has been exhibited extensively with our gallery as well as in national and international museums. With studios in Beijing and Long Island City, Lin Yan honors yet liberates herself from both Eastern and Western conventions. Without use of a brush, her rich palette of natural and ink-soaked Xuan paper fibers are cast and layered into minimalist reliefs of architectural elements from her surroundings and, most recently, from Chinese folk imagery. Simultaneously abstract and figurative, these tactile fragments of everyday life flow with emotional organic compositions that counter the geometric structures usually associated with buildings as she reflects the continuing struggle between nature and global industrialism.

Lin Yan’s choice of archival handmade Xuan paper, historically used for Chinese writing and painting since the Tang Dynasty, echoes this theme with contrasting qualities of delicacy and strength, translucence and opacity and a broad range of absorbency. Her obsession with Xuan paper began in 2005, and she continues to develop new approaches to her unique language informed by the paper’s origins as processed bark from elm and mulberry trees. Ranging from layers of stiffly cast riveted floors and walls to increasingly three-dimensional casts of roof tiles and bricks bursting with soft, cloth-like leaves of Xuan, her cast images are “not simply decorative or textural patterns in the formal sense, but signifiers of her past and of China’s past” as described by art historian and critic, Robert C. Morgan. Infused with memory and hope, and an acute awareness of transitions occurring from the Cultural Revolution and the modernization of China, the brick form used for the Monument series is dedicated to the lost culture of Beijing City, and the bricks cast for her Flag series express remaking and going beyond borders of countries